Havel's Burden

The Philosopher-King Is Mortal

By Paul Berman

Published: May 11, 1997

On Nov. 18 of last year, Vaclav Havel was found to have pneumonia and given treatment. But the pneumonia failed to subside.

Havel's lover, Dagmar Veskrnova, watched over him, and when his fever and shivering grew worse and he began to have trouble seeing, she decided to push aside his regular doctor, who was an old companion from the revolution of 1989 (but not someone with a sterling medical reputation), and call in a doctor from Homolce Hospital, the finest in Prague. Homolce was the old hospital of the party elite back in the days of Communism. The new doctor gave Havel sedatives and contemplated his sickly lungs and recommended X-rays, which turned out to be a good idea.

Havel's illness came at a delicate moment in the Czech Republic's evolution. The campaign to expand NATO to include the Czech Republic (and Poland and Hungary) was already under way, and Havel was crucial to the campaign -- crucial because he was President of the republic and the symbol of its progress, crucial also because of his ability, genuinely rare, to speak about politics in a soulful language of morals and spirituality. To get Havel back on his feet, back on the world stage speaking and exhorting -- this was the important thing.

Yet even then, at that very early stage in his suffering, it should have been obvious, merely in the arrangements for the X-rays, that Havel's crisis was going to be double: a pulmonary crisis in his weak and ailing body, and a crisis of judgment and know-how among the panicky people around him. Havel has one of the best-known faces in Europe today. Yet the decision was made to bring him to be X-rayed incognito, comic-opera style. He was registered at the hospital desk under the name of his chief bodyguard, and the farce persisted even to the point of showing Havel's X-rays to a number of doctors without telling them the patient's true identity. The X-rays themselves, with a black spot showing in the right lung, were not reassuring. The doctors consulted a leading medical professor in Prague, Dr. Pavel Pafko, who recommended surgery -- and only then did the huggermugger come to an end.

Havel was brought to Dr. Pafko's teaching hospital, the Third Surgical Clinic, on Londynska Street and was admitted under his own name. And there, on Dec. 2, the operation began, with the patient, like a man about to be executed, smoking his last cigarette before submitting to the knife. The fact that Havel was allowed to go on smoking to the end is a minor weirdness of the affair. Dr. Pafko and his team discovered a malignant tumor more than half an inch long in the right lung, and at once they cut away the malignancy and the surrounding tissue. The operation lasted four hours. When it was over the surgical team had removed half of the lung.

The most extensive of the investigations into these events was conducted by the editor of the Prague weekly Respekt, Vladimir Mlynar (whose mother, the late Rita Klimova, was a friend and ally of Havel's during the struggle against Communism and then became Havel's first Ambassador to the United States). Mlynar was able to establish a number of facts about what happened next, but on several points he could only report that the participants and observers offer contradictory versions. One of those versions is that of Dr. Pafko and some of his medical colleagues. In their estimation, the staff members of the Third Surgical Clinic are scrupulous practitioners, and President Havel received the same excellent treatment there that anyone would receive. The President was given the regular hospital meals and was put in the intensive-care unit with other patients, separated only by screens, and there was no reason for complaint.

According to another version, the Third Surgical Clinic is a miserable place, and the treatment that Havel received there was scandalous. The President's staff had to bring its own electric generator to the hospital. Havel, lying barely conscious in his bed, became virtually a tourist attraction. Staff members from around the hospital trooped by to gape.

Everyone agrees, in any event, that after the operation a new pneumonia was detected in Havel's left lung. His pulse rose to a level twice that of a healthy person. Dr. Pafko was obliged to request technical aid from his colleagues at Homolce, who sent a doctor, six nurses and a lung ventilator. And on Dec. 5, Dr. Pafko and his team operated again, this time to perform a tracheotomy -- that is, to open a hole in Havel's throat -- to put him on the ventilator and prevent him from suffocating.

Now the President's heart began to show signs of trouble. He no longer recognized people. And on top of everything else, the lung ventilator went on the blink, either for mechanical reasons or because the attendant forgot to fill the oxygen tank -- which either posed no danger to the President (because the failure was brief) or brought him to the brink of death, depending on the version of the story. Dagmar Veskrnova walked into the room and saw him suffocating.